John Stuart Mill learned Greek at three and hit a breakdown at twenty
James Mill set out to manufacture a genius who would carry utilitarianism forward, and his son John Stuart was reading Herodotus in Greek by eight. At twenty the experiment cracked: Mill realised that achieving his life's goal would not make him happy. Wordsworth's poetry pulled him back, and changed how he thought.
Mill was born in 1806 in Pentonville, on the edge of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher James Mill. His father, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, educated him at home with Bentham's help and kept him away from other children apart from his siblings. Greek began at three; Latin, Euclid and algebra at eight, when he was also made schoolmaster to his younger siblings. At about twelve he tackled Aristotle's logic in the original, and his notes on daily economics lessons helped his father write a textbook on David Ricardo's theories. Ricardo himself took the boy on walks to talk economics.
At fourteen he spent a year in France with Bentham's brother Samuel, attended science courses in Montpellier, acquired a lifelong love of mountains, and met figures such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Henri Saint-Simon in Paris.
The crisis came at twenty. Months of despair, even thoughts of suicide, followed his discovery that a just society would not bring him personal joy. Reading Wordsworth convinced him that beauty breeds compassion and delight, and he returned to reform with more pleasure in the work itself. He counted this among the most important shifts in his thinking, and it opened distance between him and his father.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century. On Liberty, from 1859, set out the harm principle, defending individual freedom against unlimited state and social pressure; the Liberal Democrats still hand a copy to each new party president. He co-wrote The Subjection of Women, became only the second MP after Henry Hunt to call for women's suffrage, and backed proportional representation and cooperatives, at times edging towards socialism. He died in 1873.
Source: John Stuart Mill
